7 Bedtime Rituals to Help You Sleep Better ...

At night, your body temperature starts dipping naturally. Associate Professor at New York University School of Medicine Joyce Walsleben recommends a long soak in a hot tub for about 20-30 minutes. This helps your body temperature rise and the subsequent drop at bedtime relaxes and lulls you into deep sleep.

Starting late in the evening the body releases a chemical known as melatonin, which can be best explained as the ‘hormone for darkness’. This chemical makes you sleepy but only if it receives the right sort of impetus from the environment.

For this reason, you may want to consider installing a dimmer in your bedroom. It will allow you to turn down the lighting of your room as the evening progresses, thereby putting you in the right frame of mind for sleep.

Those who find it hard to sleep are often advised not to drink coffee after noon. This is because caffeine sticks around in your system for a long time and disrupts your sleep cycle. Same goes for nicotine. You may think smoking before bedtime will help you relax. Quite the opposite, in fact. It will alert the brain and speed up your heart rate. Good luck sleeping with a supercharged heart and brain!

Lit screens, such as the television or the computer monitor stimulate your brain. So, it’s best to avoid catching re-runs of your favorite show late at night. Before your bed time, you need to slow down your brain with activities like meditation or reading a book in a comfortable armchair.

Cold feet could be one of the reasons why you can’t get decent sleep at night. Keeping your socks on will improve blood circulation in the extremities of the body and make you fall asleep more quickly.

Avoid having a large meal or even a small spicy snack too close to your bedtime. With your digestive working at this time of the night, there’s no way you are going to be able to sleep.

With liquids such as water or excessive alcohol - you will find yourself getting up throughout the night to use the bathroom. You won’t be able to catch the restorative REM sleep that is so important for you to feel refreshed the following day.

A regular routine at night helps the brain relax and move into what you can call the ‘sleep mode’. Help your body recognize that bedtime is imminent by fixing a routine you repeat every night such as laying out your night clothes, brushing your hair or your teeth, and applying cream on your body.

Our lives are hectic and we want everything superfast these days. But some things just need to be done the old-fashioned way because you can’t always force your body into submission. Which of the following rituals are you guilty of breaking and what are you going to do to repair things?

Top image source: yourhealthcareonline.blog.com